3D Printers Make Art for Future Robots

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NEW YORK — A sculpture of the golden ratio, a computer-coded
painting of the "Mona Lisa" and a chair made out of hexadecimal
codes are just some of the mathematically inspired art presented
by one innovator this weekend at the World Maker Faire.

In her project, called "Reverse Abstraction," Brooklyn-based
artist Ashley Zelinskie used 3D
printing to create sculptures made of binary and hexadecimal
codes, the series of digits that a computer uses to process
information. The numbers may look like pure abstraction to the
human mind, but they make up a computer's "language."

"Binary code is not abstract to a computer — it's how its brain
works," Zelinskie said. "This is how it sees the world." Her
sculptures are also forms that humans can grasp — cubes,
triangles or a chair, for instance. The computer code they are
made of appears as a sophisticated and delicate texture to the
human eye. [ See Photos
of Zelinskie's 3D-Printed Sculptures ]

"So, it's art that both a human and a computer can appreciate,"
Zelinskie said Sunday (Sept. 22) at a presentation here at the
2013 Maker Faire New York.

Zelinskie's first attempt to blur the line between how art is
perceived by humans and by computerswas to create a chair, made
of hexadecimal code, which, if read by a computer, would be the
3D rendering of a chair.

The chair was inspired by Joseph Kosuth's conceptual work in
1965, "One and Three Chairs," in which he questioned reality by
including a chair, a picture of a chair and the definition of
"chair," Zelinskie said. "What is the real chair?" was Kosuth's
question, and the coded version of the chair was aimed to ask the
same question — but in the 21st century, Zelinskie said.

Next pieces in the "Reverse Abstraction" series were cubes made
of code that reads cubes, a golden 3D-printed representation of
the
golden ratio made up of the repetition of its
mathematical equation, and a pi-shaped sculpture made of the
mathematical constant up to hundreds of digits.

Zelinskie also makes "paintings" that consist of a series of
numbers. In her "Mona Lisa," she took an image of Leonardo da
Vinci's masterpiece from Google Art Project and broke it down
into its basic hexadecimal code. The code was then fit onto a
canvas the same size as the original work of art.

"This work is not for us. It is for the future. And
robots," Zelinskie said in her artist statement. "Each of
these pieces takes for granted that computers will outlast their
makers, that technology will supplant humanity and that craft
should follow suit."